NH&RA

Challenge

The National Housing & Rehabilitation Association (NH&RA) is the professional association for affordable-housing and multifamily owners, developers, and the professionals who serve them. The website is where members read industry news, register for conferences and webinars, read Tax Credit Advisor, and manage their membership.

When cre8 took it on, the site ran on DotNetNuke, a .NET content management system, with member records, logins, and event registration handled by NH&RA’s association management system. Every change to the site was expensive, and the staff couldn’t publish without help. The job was to get NH&RA onto a platform its own team could run, without breaking the member system that everything else depended on.

Approach

Replatform first, keep the member system. cre8 moved the site from DotNetNuke to WordPress and ported the content and data across. The association management system stayed where it was: cre8 coordinated with the vendor so members kept a single login for member-only content, including Tax Credit Advisor articles, and for event registration. Staff got an editor they could use.

Redesign on the same platform. Four years on, the organization had outgrown the first WordPress build. In early 2022 cre8 wireframed and redesigned the site from the homepage down: an events hub that combines conferences and webinars in one listing, a news and resources section organized by category, sponsor and advertising placements, and job and funding-opportunity postings. Two things NH&RA didn’t have before came with it: an online store on WooCommerce, and on-demand learning built on LearnDash. The member-system screens were re-skinned to match the new design, so a member moving from the site into the portal doesn’t notice the seam. The new site launched April 29, 2022.

Spin out the magazine. Tax Credit Advisor had lived inside housingonline.com. cre8 later moved it to its own WordPress site with editorial tools and subscriptions of its own.

Keep running it. cre8 provides ongoing CMS support and manages the site’s edge: Cloudflare in front, DNS and domains, and the quarterly PCI scans that come with taking card payments on the site.

Outcome

• Two platform changes in one relationship, both on cre8’s schedule rather than a deadline’s: DotNetNuke to WordPress, then a full redesign that launched April 29, 2022.
• Members keep one login across the site and the member portal, through both moves.
• Events, on-demand courses, a store, sponsor placements, and job postings all run inside WordPress, so NH&RA staff publish without a developer.
• The site passes its quarterly PCI compliance scans, with the SecurityMetrics badge in the header to show it.